Elementary Art Teacher Newsletter: What to Tell Parents Each Month

Elementary art class is the part of the school week parents know least about. Their child comes home saying "we drew stuff" or shows a project that is hard to interpret from the outside. A good elementary art newsletter gives families the context to understand what they are looking at and the language to ask their child a real question about it.

What elementary parents most want to know

Elementary parents care about two things in an art newsletter: what is their child making and why does it matter. The second question is the one that gets skipped most often. Every project in elementary art has an educational purpose beyond the product. Name it.

"Students are creating monoprints this month" is a report. "Students are creating monoprints, which teaches them to design an image that will appear in reverse when printed. That spatial reasoning challenge is different from any other kind of art-making and develops a type of visual thinking that students rarely encounter." Both describe the same project. One makes a parent think "that sounds interesting." The other makes them think "okay."

The art vocabulary section

Include one vocabulary term per newsletter with a definition that connects to observable things in the world. Art vocabulary is full of terms that sound academic but describe things everyone sees every day.

• Value: the range from light to dark in any image. "Look at a black- and-white photo and notice how many shades of gray exist between white and black. That range is value."
• Texture: the surface quality of an artwork, real or implied. "Run your hand across brick and then across glass. Both are textures. Artists can create the feeling of both without using the actual material."
• Perspective: the technique that makes flat drawings look three- dimensional. "Notice that in a photograph of train tracks, the tracks appear to converge at a point in the distance. That is perspective."

One term is enough. More than one per newsletter starts to feel like a glossary rather than a conversation.

The artist or tradition section

When students study a specific artist or art tradition, introduce it briefly in your newsletter. One sentence on who the artist is, one sentence on what makes their work distinctive, and one sentence on what students are taking from it.

"Students are studying the collage work of Romare Bearden, a twentieth- century American artist who combined images from magazines and photographs into scenes of urban life. His technique inspires the collage project students are currently working on, and it introduces students to how an artist can tell a story through fragments rather than a single drawn image."

The home observation

End every newsletter with one visual observation families can make near home, connected to the current unit. "Find three examples of a warm color (red, orange, yellow) and three examples of a cool color (blue, green, purple) in one room of your house." Easy, visual, connected to the lesson, and requires no preparation.

Art show communication

Art shows are the emotional peak of the elementary art year. Start communicating about them at least a month in advance. Families who receive build-up newsletters before the show arrive as engaged attendees rather than obligated guests.